Mission 2025 – Space4Climate’s 1st Members’ Conference

By the Space4Climate Core Team

Gathering at Geovation, in London, on January 30^th, we celebrated a successful start to this three-year business plan, made possible by securing a 2022/23 – 2024/25 funding package committed by the UK Space Agency.

With a bumper conference attendance in person and online, we reviewed the involvement of members in the opening year of the strategy and looked ahead to more opportunities in Years 2 and 3 through our ‘Mission 2025’ delivery plan.  It pledges to bring further growth in membership, key relationships, internal and external events and promotion of the UK’s thriving Earth Observation for climate community both nationally and internationally, and to new audiences.

Mission 2025: High-Level Programme Plans

Presented by Krupa Nanda Kumar, Space4Climate’s Climate Services Development Manager

Space4Climate (S4C) spans government, industry and academia, uniting those with expertise in the development of satellites, analysis and exploitation of data and production of quality-assured global data and climate services. Core to our operations is our membership: we often refer to our membership as a community and we are proud to be supporting 55 thriving organisations (and counting!) in the UK space climate sector.

We have achieved exponential success and testimony to that is the largest commitment to date made by our chair organisation, UK Space Agency to enable S4C to continue to conduct activities to grow and promote climate-related work across research, academia and industry. Mission 2025 will  carry on the positive work done in the past with greater emphasis on re-igniting purpose and passion through action and inspiration.

The UK is taking steps to build independent climate capabilities across all technology sectors and we see S4C playing a greater role now than ever before to unite the UK Earth Observation (EO) climate community, provide unparallelled in-kind support to profile and promote our community’s capabilities nationally and internationally, and to encourage the development of novel climate innovation from within the community.

Our four core mission pillars are:

1. Convene the satellite EO climate community: We are passionate about growing our community as the sector rapidly grows but more so to introduce associate members across space clusters as allies for greater national support and impact. By 2025 we envision a well-connected S4C network represented within every major UK space cluster.
2. Showcase UK space-enabled climate service capabilities and successes: We continue to act as the UK’s single coordination point to represent EO climate commercial, research and government interests through neutral brokerage activities at both local and global scale. Through our Space4Climate App on the PufferTouch we spotlight our members’ capabilities and we will be working on updating and improving the interaction of case studies on this eye-catching platform for future events. The launch and promotion of our Climate Services Directory will further enhance our ability to showcase UK capabilities at a much wider scale.
3. Facilitate public and commercial domestic and international exploitation of climate data from space: S4C is well-positioned to play a crucial role in delivering communication about upcoming climate satellite missions to prepare target audiences to exploit the new climate data streams. With our members we have a set of activities planned that will help disseminate knowledge of these missions and ready the downstream market with the tools and knowledge they will need to start exploitation. Furthermore for 2023, we have set our eyes on high profile national and international events where we plan to aggressively promote UK capabilities through event interactions and panel talks. Late last year we conducted two bootcamps for PwC London’s space team and sustainability and Net Zero team, introducing real world existing case studies and the possibilities of adopting satellite climate data and tools across the sectors they address. The two events were very successful and we plan to continue working closely with consultants/translation providers to improve the adoption of EO climate data across industries.
4. Host and support climate development innovation activities: Finally, on the pre-commercial climate services development side, by 2025 we hope to have at least four new climate demonstrators through our Task Group activities which will be solely funded by the S4C programme. We will be scoping market research activities and partnering with translation providers to develop actionable insights to improve the seamless supply chain of climate data services. Additionally, we are supporting the UK Space Agency on climate calls, the first of which closed on December 31^st, 2022, and awardees are about to be announced. Last but not the least we look forward to supporting Innovate UK KTN’s Climate Impact Lab later this year.

Task Groups 2.0 – a crucial forum for novel solutions

Space4Climate Task Groups bring together members with experience or interest in topical issues to focus on discovering EO-based solutions to market needs towards the development of innovative pre-commercial climate services, either independently or with participating end users. I might be right in saying that there is currently no other forum that allows the UK EO climate community to put their heads together and jointly develop novel solutions, hence they are a crucial opportunity for our members. We will be conducting a Task Group 2.0 workshop very soon, detailing guidelines and brainstorming activities to ignite new ideas that can be co-developed. We introduced our Net Zero Working Group in 2022 which will be a running activity throughout Mission 2025, targeting decarbonisation using satellite EO climate services across various industries.

Our first pilot of our Working Group on Sustainable Finance, open to all members to join, will launch in 2023/24 Q1. Its aim will be to develop climate services demonstrators with funding provided by Space4Climate.

Climate Services Directory

I announced at the conference that Space4Climate’s Directory will be rolled out to all members and it is now open! Our Board and members have helped us shape the Directory, keeping in the mind the quality standards required to service the climate domain. We have therefore developed the Directory to ensure it is not ‘another catalogue’ but sets a minimum level of quality standards expected of organisations applying to be featured.  We will endeavour to evolve the Directory in Phase 2 of development to be a ‘bible’ of space-based climate services available through UK organisations.

We will be promoting the Directory across our social media platforms and at events, both in the UK and internationally, as the ‘go-to climate services database’, we therefore urge all member organisations to sign-up. Applications will be rolled out nationwide in mid-2023.

Members can sign-up here – https://space4climate.com/s4c-climate-services-directory/

S4C supports the Space for Climate Observatory (SCO) Charter as the official coordination partner for UK Space Agency

The Space Climate Observatory (SCO) is an international initiative of the One Planet Summit, officially launched in June 2019. It brings together space agencies from around the world and international organisations (United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), European Space Agency (ESA), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The SCO aims to signpost to verified projects and services that monitor climate impacts on territories using satellite data, in-situ data and local socio-economic data, suitable for decision-makers at any local level to inform their climate adaptation measures.

The SCO is in line with the Paris Agreement, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the strategies developed by the World Meteorological Office (WMO) and the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS). With 34 actors signed up to the SCO charter, including the UK Space Agency, SCO aims to coordinate international efforts to support the emergence of operational tools for climate monitoring, mitigation and adaptation.

The UK Space Agency and S4C are seeking to identify potential SCO-compliant projects from UK organisations. We will circulate a SCO application form for the evaluation of projects to be labelled as SCO compliant.

Read more about SCO here https://www.spaceclimateobservatory.org/local-sco

Mission 2025: Communications and Engagement

Presented by Sally Stevens, Space4Climate’s Communications and Engagement Manager

International showcases at GLOC 2023 and COP28

Based on Space4Climate’s expanding influence we look ahead to building on the success of the crucial role the UK and our members played at COP26, in Glasgow in 2021, and COP27, in Egypt and our plans for the Global Space Conference on Climate Change (GLOC) 2023 Conference in Norway in May and COP28 in Dubai at the beginning of December.

Our Chair, Beth Greenaway, who is Head of Earth Observation and Climate at UK Space Agency, engaged everyone’s attention when she said that both these events are expected to have a strong focus on Earth Observation for climate and would be an important showcase for UK expertise and capabilities. Beth called on members to take maximum advantage of the platforms and of UK investment in upcoming climate satellite missions, building their own strategies to be ready to exploit the data due to be delivered.

Space4Climate is preparing to provide new content and resources to be presented by the UK delegation in Dubai to highlight our members’ expertise to the international climate data from space community.

Get ready for new science and climate data from UK-involved missions

In a direct call for action, members were told to prepare to exploit new climate data that will be made available by upcoming satellite missions. MicroCarb, TRUTHS (Traceable Radiometry Underpinning Terrestrial- and Helio-Studies)  and Biomass all rely on UK investment and skills in collaboration with other space agencies, giving new opportunities to Space4Climate members. The first new data supply is set to come from SWOT, the Surface Water and Oceanographic Topography satellite  whose launch in California Beth attended in December. It is led by NASA with key input from the Canadian and UK Space Agencies.

More opportunities for Space4Climate members

Upcoming funding calls and opportunities were outlined by our speakers and by UK Space Agency. Guest speakers at the conference were:

• Prof Chris Merchant, NCEO and University of Reading, and a member of Space4Climate’s Board, who briefed members on the new UK Earth Observations Climate Information Service (EOCIS).
• Andy Bennett of Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnership, who introduced the Climate Impact Lab under the title ‘Market ready solutions for climate resilience, adaptation & net zero’, which will be a challenge-led co-creation environment for the climate crisis.
• Carly Morris, Head of Geovation which hosted the conference.
• Iliana Cardenes, Science & Innovation at BEIS, who outlined current policy and looked ahead to COP28.
• Sophie Hebden, Research Coordinator for Earth Observations at the European Space Agency Climate Office, who briefed members on the upcoming evolution of the Climate Change Initiative (CCI) to the new and expanded ‘Climate-Service’.

In a recap, members heard that it has been another busy year on the communications and engagement front. Thanks were given to Barry Latter at NCEO / RAL Space for his work on our Space4Climate App updates, part of our ongoing work to promote members’ case studies to national and international audiences, working closely with the great team at Pufferfish.​ The updates led to our App taking centre stage on the UK’s pavilion at COP27 as well as being a big draw at the 2022 UK Earth Observation Conference co-organised by NCEO and held at National Space Park, Leicester.

Thanks was also given to members who provided their export case studies for the Department for International Trade in the autumn. This was for their invitation-only Green Investment event in the North East in November 2022 so we were delighted to be able to take advantage of that opportunity.​

2023-24 events planning (Mission 2025 year 2)

The funding agreement with the UK Space Agency means we are now able to better plan how to most effectively use Space4Climate’s resources for the next year of events. We aim to have our stand at two major events a year – this is what we call a Gold event. A Silver event is where we join a members’ stand or take part in a panel, for example; a Bronze event is where we attend to meet exhibitors, take in panels or where we simply create and post online content to engage with the audiences remotely.​

In a Sli.do poll of our in-person and online audiences, we asked members to rank potential events in order of preference and to list events they would like Space4Climate to attend and events they are planning to join:

Which EO event would you most like S4C to attend? (rank in order of preference).

2023-24 communications and engagement campaigns

The new Space4Climate Directory will be an important campaign in Year 2 of Mission 2025, promoting the UK’s climate capabilities, products and services. Planned activity includes:

• Directory launch – campaigns to encourage organisations to sign-up and, alongside this, promotional activities to raise awareness of the Space4Climate Services Directory to potential users in the UK and internationally.​
• New online content with more of a focus on video and social media to increase engagement.We will be targeting content to grow the community and membership​, including our Space4Climate Champions, and look to pool resources with members around COP28 and GLOC 2023.
• In line with the progress of upcoming climate data satellite missions – SWOT, MicroCarb, TRUTHS, Biomass – we will be producing and collaborating on usable, informative and accessible content. ​We will highlight the UK expertise involved in bringing these to fruition.
• Connecting with regional groups and activities​ – if you are part of a regional group please let me know, we’d like to identify where we can collaborate to make the most difference.
• Continuing to collaborate with members to highlight your news and campaigns.
• 9th Communications Workshop​ in the summer.

Looking ahead to 2024/25 (Mission 2025 year 3)

We shared with members a look ahead to our Year 3 plans:​

• Still fulfilling our commitment to create, provide and share high quality content and campaigns: we will showcase the UK as a hub for climate satellite and services innovations.
• Ramping up activities and resources to enable the community to get a head start on climate data from satellite missions for and opportunities from UK-involved missions​, to exploit data, do the science, prompt new climate products and services, rewarding the significant investment the UK has made and continues to make not climate satellite missions through collaboration with other space agencies.
• And what about the S4C-developed/supported climate services? With investment and focus on our task groups and targeted content we will be communicating and supporting the fantastic outcomes of ​S4C-developed and supported climate services. ​
• Increasingly our commitment to events will maximise the potential for our members to take part.
• To underpin these ambitions, we will be giving the Space4Climate website an overhaul to meet the expectations and needs of audiences to position the website as the reliable and trusted point of contact for the UK Earth Observation for climate community.

Next steps

Feedback from the first Space4Climate Members’ Conference has been very positive and we are keen to make it an annual event while continuing to hold quarterly Group Meetings. Make sure you receive notifications of future members’ meetings and events by subscribing to our members’ newsletter, email Sally, s.stevens@reading.ac.uk